The good news is, at least there's a sensible number of X-books this week.  The bad news is, three of them are about the Age of Apocalypse and fourth is an issue of X4.

Why are we getting a load of Age of Apocalypse stories, you may ask?  Simple.  It's because it's ten years since the original story.  Which, come to think of it, was itself part of the twentieth anniversary commemorations for Giant-Size X-Men #1, so we're now reading a story celebrating ten fabulous years since it was twenty fabulous years since 1975.  Perhaps they should put a little ouroboros logo on the cover of this stuff.

In fairness, as mid-nineties event comics go, the Age of Apocalypse is quite fondly regarded.  It's not a classic of the medium, but it had a lot going for it.  At least it was story-driven, and it had a strong central premise - the X-Men botch a time travel story, and we get four months of a world where Xavier's missing, everything's gone to hell, and Magneto's leading the X-Men against Apocalypse, before the reset button gets hit in the final issue.  Crucially, it was also relatively self-contained.  A handful of characters bled out into the mainstream Marvel Universe, but basically the Age of Apocalypse had a beginning, a middle and an end - qualities that were at a premium in 1995, when most stories had a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a crossover, a middle, and a petering out.

So, am I intrigued by the possibilities of a new Age of Apocalypse story?  No, not remotely.  For one thing, even the original story had plenty of filler, as satellite titles like X-Force and Excalibur found themselves politely killing time for four months before fulfilling some extremely minor plot point in the final issue.  For another, the miniseries is written by Akira Yoshida, who also brought us the rancid X4 miniseries.  As it turns out, we're picking up a year after the end of Age of Apocalypse, and the world hasn't ended after all. 

If ever there was a story which didn't call for a sequel, it's Age of Apocalypse, which ends with the destruction of the world.  In order to do a sequel at all, that bit has to be reversed, but Apocalypse is still defeated.  So we're now in a world which isn't the Age of Apocalypse any more anyway.  The concept is spent before the story even starts, and it's not readily obvious what the big idea is meant to be.  Only a year has passed, but the post-Apocalypse world has already gone back to business as usual. 

We've even got tourists being shown around Apocalypse's slave pens and lectured about them as if they were Auschwitz, a scene which gives me all manner of problems.  For one thing, surely all these tourists lived through the Age of Apocalypse and shouldn't be treating it as a remote historical event.  For another, I'm deeply uncomfortable about mid-1990s crossovers holding themselves up as equivalent to the Holocaust, no matter how much the plot may superficially justify the comparison.  Holocaust himself always troubled me as a character.  Don't get me wrong, I don't find any of this offensive; there's just a hideous, jarring disconnect between the story and the events that it tries to compare itself to.

Anyhow.  Since Exiles has a couple of characters who are refugees from the Age of Apocalypse, it gets sucked into this whole affair, and dumped with Holocaust as a character.  Nominally the mission here is to stop the X-Men from defeating Mr Sinister, which presumably ties in somewhere to events in the Age of Apocalypse miniseries which haven't been published yet.  Fortunately, Tony Bedard largely ignores the crossover in favour of advancing his own storyline - since the AoA also has ready access to a fragment of the M'Kraan Crystal, which is some sort of interdimensional nexus, the Exiles can use it to get at the Timebroker.

Decent enough when it's furthering the ongoing storylines.  But as you can probably tell, my total lack of enthusiasm for the whole event also spills over to this book.

Rating: B-

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